More women bringing home the bacon, more men cooking it

Karen Wright plays a board game with her two sons Brendan Roberts, 12, left, and Conor Roberts, 10, at their home in Toronto Tuesday September 21, 2010.

Photograph by: Tim Fraser
, Postmedia News

Karen Wright calls herself an "Accidental Alpha."

For the last seven years, the Toronto-based executive coach has been the primary breadwinner for her husband and two sons, aged 10 and 12.

This isn't the way she planned things.

When they married 15 years ago, Wright's husband was a successful entrepreneur with his own marketing business, but then the industry changed, his company faltered and health problems took a toll, so they decided he'd be "the guy at home" until he sorted out his next venture.

"The reality is I am the breadwinner and will be for the foreseeable future, and it is a real struggle," Wright, 51, says. "It's different than I thought it would be."

It's "wonderful" her husband now has dinner on the table every night, but she says the pressure of having the only paycheque means she doesn't have the option to scale back work and focus on the things closest to her heart.

"I came home one day to find him about to bake cookies, and I said, 'What the heck do you think you're doing?! I bake the cookies in this house!'" she says. "In spite of the fact that I run a great business and love what I do, I don't get enough mom stuff in my life."

More and more Canadian women are assuming the role of primary family breadwinner, either by choice because of rising education levels and earning power, or by default when a spouse loses their job — a common scenario during the recent recession, when nearly three-quarters of jobs lost in Canada were held by men.

Statistics Canada reported last year that 18 per cent of Canadian women are the primary breadwinners in their families, up from 14 per cent in 1997. In the same time-frame, the proportion of women matching or exceeding their husbands' earnings climbed from 37 per cent to 42 per cent.

"It's been just a steady progression of women's education going up and employment going up, but then quite a remarkable leap in women being primary breadwinners or shared primary breadwinners relates to the changes in the economy," says Andrea Doucet, a sociology professor at Carleton University and author of Bread and Roses — And the Kitchen Sink, an upcoming book on women who are the primary earners in their families.

Women's earnings are increasing faster than men's, Statistics Canada says, and while the combined work hours of couples remained unchanged at about 77 hours per week between 1997 and 2008, women are responsible for a bigger proportion of that and men are working less. On an hourly basis, wives earned on average 81 per cent as much as their husbands in 2008, but that gap has narrowed since 1997, when they made 77 per cent of what their husbands did.

The trajectory in the United States looks much the same, with 27 per cent of women out-earning their employed husbands in 2008, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That's up from 18 per cent in 1987. When families where the husband isn't working are included, 35 per cent of women are the main breadwinners.

Aside from the recession's toll on male employment, Doucet says this trend is driven by steadily increasing women's employment over the last three or four decades, with more generous parental leave policies, flexible work and technology allowing more options for staying in the labourforce after they have children.

"You see that the roles within the family at home are also changing, with men contributing more to childcare and housework. Women still do more, but men have increased their hours and women have decreased their hours," says Katherine Marshall, a senior analyst with Statistics Canada.

Cheryl Smith and her husband Robert have been together since 1980, and as a career and leadership coach, she's always earned more than he brings home as a freelance motorcycle journalist and photographer.

"We both work equally hard; the work that I do just generates more," says Cheryl, a 59-year-old resident of the Vancouver suburb of Delta.

The couple doesn't have children and they've developed a balance between their work and home responsibilities, with Robert handling laundry, bill payment, household maintenance and everything to do with food. He sometimes even takes over kitchen cleanup if Cheryl is busy with work, which often requires travel.

Still, she says in her "blackest moments," the anxiety and exhaustion of the breadwinner role bubble up.

"There is a part of me that wonders if I can trust, if it's safe for me to take my foot off the gas, to hold back and relax, not be thinking and working all the time. Would I be safe?" she says. "That's an awful thing to say out loud, but it's true."

The rise of female breadwinners is much more complicated than simply swapping gender roles at home, Doucet says.

It can be very difficult for men to let go of the deeply ingrained expectation that they should be the primary earners supporting their families — particularly if the change was unplanned or sudden — she says, and they often have to justify their decision to stay home or scale back work to be with their kids, while a woman never would.

Breadwinning women, on the other hand, struggle with balancing their career demands and desire to be there for their children, as Wright has discovered, and many still mentally maintain the family's "kitchen calendar" and feel pressure to have clean floors at home, too, Doucet says.

"You can't just say, 'Well now she's at work and he's at home,' and just switch the genders," she says. "There are those deep tracts that pull people in different ways."

Clarence Lochhead, executive director of the Vanier Institute of the Family, predicts partners will increasingly take on the role of "co-providers" for their families in both the workplace and at home, though he says it's going to take a lot of "change and negotiation" to reach that point. He also believes more breadwinning women will eventually spur more family-friendly workplaces because they'll simply expect policies such as parental leave top-ups, flexible work arrangements and childcare supports that help balance the family and household responsibilities that still fall disproportionately to them.

"There's the potential for these women to be kind of a vanguard for change in workplaces," he says. "People will have to get on board with this or it's not going to be a very good or workable relationship within the household."

We'll see shifts in consumer goods and services as manufacturers and marketers recognize that women are earning more and making more decisions on that front, Lochhead says, mentioning signs of this already in financial planning advertisements that highlight men and women making money decisions together.

Wright says clear communication is essential to making these roles work in families and sorting out who's responsible for what — and when they need to stay out of each other's way. She's told her husband that in addition to cookie-baking duties, she needs to claim back-to-school shopping with her boys, even if it means they have to wait a few extra days until she has time.

She says she coined the term "Accidental Alpha" to reflect the fact that many breadwinning women didn't expect to find themselves in this role and might not like it. She recently created an online community of the same name after realizing the topic sparked a deluge of comments every time she brought it up with friends or colleagues. Wright says much of her struggle has to do with her generational ideas about family roles, and as women accumulate more education and earning power, this type of balancing act might be easier for a younger generation of families.

"My traditional perspective comes down to: I want to be the mom. I want to be the one who's home with them and wrangling homework and making dinner," she says. "I really, really want to do all that, in addition to all this other professional stuff that I'm great at and I love."

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